Wolfowitz on Iraq crisis: ‘This is about preventing another 9/11′

posted at 2:01 pm on June 17, 2014 by Noah Rothman

In an appearance on MSNBC with host Chuck Todd on Tuesday, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the present crisis in Iraq in one that demands forward thinking and not an endless series of retrospectives on the Iraq War.

Of course, Wolfowitz has an obvious self-interest in making that assertion, and escaping the part he played in the 2003 invasion of Iraq is an impossible task. Though while maintaining that he would have conducted the war differently, and objecting to the term “architect,” the former deputy defense secretary defended his role in the war and argued that American withdrawal from Iraq was premature.

Wolfowitz added that abandoning Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a luxury the West cannot afford at the moment. “If we had walked away from [former South Korean Prime Minister] Syngman Rhee, who was the Maliki of his time, we would have had North Korea taking over South Korea,” Wolfowitz asserted.

He added that the threat posed by ISIS creating a safe haven in Iraq represents a clear and present threat to the homeland. “This is about preventing another 9/11,” he said.

While some may disregard this claim, it seems that Wolfowitz is not alone in this belief.

“At the end of the day, if ISIS continues, then we’ll have to — and succeeds, then we’ll have to consider what is the threat to us,” said chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) who also appeared on Todd’s program. “I believe ISIS would clearly want to launch attacks against the United States.”

“Whether it be successful or not would be a question, but their desire to do so and the ability to launch from a place in which they could act with impunity is something we have to consider in our national interest,” the ranking Democrat concluded.

Menendez joins former acting CIA director Mike Morell who told CBS News on Monday that one of ISIS’s goals, after the creation of a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Fertile Crescent, would be to launch attacks against Americans and the American homeland.

That’s as broad an ideological consensus on matters of national security and foreign affairs as it gets. How long can President Barack Obama resist that kind of pressure before acting?

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As Sunni extremists broaden their control of territory from Syria deep into Iraq, the Middle East may now be facing its greatest challenge in decades.

“This is the Talibanization of Iraq,” journalist and author Robin Wright told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “And there’s no question that the global Jihadi threat is greater today than it was at the height in the 1980s or even in 2001, when we saw the attacks in Washington and New York.”

The U.S. has started moving more military assets into the region as militants advance towards the Iraqi city of Baquba, just 60 kilometers from Baghdad. President Barack Obama has said that he will not send troops in on the ground.

The rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has been fuelled by civil war in Syria. The group is trying to carve out a Sunni statelet that straddles the nearly none-existent border between Iraq and Syria.

“Ultimately we can’t solve Iraq with also dealing with Syria,” Wright said. “That’s what makes this challenge arguably greater than any one we’ve faced in the Middle East, you could argue, in six or seven decades.”

“The whole map of the Middle East is now up for grabs. There are fundamental questions about borders that have prevailed for a century that now may not be hold together. We find a jihadi threat that could be with us for a far longer period of time, in far greater numbers than in Afghanistan.”

So worrying is the situation that there is a real possibility that Iran and the United States, which both support the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, may join forces to try to diffuse the situation.

“There is a sense that they share a common cause right now – they both are concerned that their policies of the decade have failed.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to see American drone strikes providing air cover for ground involvement by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” she said, but rather an effort to “salvage the Iraqi state diplomatically.”

There are two chief concerns about latest rapid developments in Iraq, Geoff Dyer, Washington correspondent for The Financial Times, told Amanpour.

“You have the immediate fear that you have this very, very radical jihadi group that is taking control of a huge slate of territory, mostly in Iraq but also in Syria.”

“And then you have a secondary fear, which is that this will start at a deeper civil war in Iraq and that the country will essentially fragment into three ethnic statelets – a Sunni statelet, a Shia statelet and a Kurdish statelet.”

“And these are two very interlinked but different types of crises. And the U.S. is going to have to have different types of policies to deal with both. And that’s the real problem.”

Insofar as the chaos in Iraq is a result of the civil war in Syria, many criticize the Obama Administration for failing to robustly back Syria’s moderate early in the conflict.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a new book about her time at the State Department that she disagreed with the president on his decision not to arm the moderate opposition.

“There’s a very valid debate about what the U.S. could or could not have done in 2011 when the civil war in Syria was just beginning to get going,” Dyer said.

“But we’re now two and a half years later from that. The reality on the ground is very much different. The options the U.S. has even if it did want to change its approach are much more limited. And so it’s not such a simple question to say the U.S. needs to change its attitude. Unfortunately, the things that it has, and its capacity to do are very limited.”

Realistically speaking, what’s the best outcome America could hope for with American intervention?

chris0christies0donut on June 17, 2014 at 2:06 PM

Realistically? Ahmed Chalabi and a bunch of INC goons go over and take command of a bunch of former Baathist military officers, with as much hardware, money and leeway to do what needs to be done to pacify the population.

Just don’t be surprised if he turns into the next Saddam Hussein in the process. If you like sausage…

Wolfowitz added that abandoning Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a luxury the West cannot afford at the moment. “If we had walked away from [former South Korean Prime Minister] Syngman Rhee, who was the Maliki of his time, we would have had North Korea taking over South Korea,” Wolfowitz asserted.

Riiight… because we all know that Syngman Rhee was a Muslim.

Wolfowitz is a moron living in the stone ages just like every other retarded neo-con.

The problem is MUSLIMS you moron! They don’t think the same way anyone else does.

Menendez joins former acting CIA director Mike Morell who told CBS News on Monday that one of ISIS’s goals, after the creation of a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Fertile Crescent, would be to launch attacks against Americans and the American homeland.

Muslims already are attacking us, and have been doing this for a long time, even pre-9/11.

Why. The. F*ck. is MSNBC asking Paul Wolfowitz *anything* about Iraq? Everything he said in the lead up about how the invasion and occupation would play out was wrong. Literally, everything. Do you people really think MSNBC is some anti-war network? I’m literally sick to my stomach.

Why. The. F*ck. is MSNBC asking Paul Wolfowitz *anything* about Iraq? Everything he said in the lead up about how the invasion and occupation would play out was wrong. Literally, everything. Do you people really think MSNBC is some anti-war network? I’m literally sick to my stomach.

libfreeordie on June 17, 2014 at 2:36 PM

It says a lot that MSNBC would turn to Wolfowitz on how to UnFu*k what Obama has done. Doesn’t it?

How bad does this administration have to be for MSNBC to turn to Bush Administration for strategy?

Why. The. F*ck. is MSNBC asking Paul Wolfowitz *anything* about Iraq? Everything he said in the lead up about how the invasion and occupation would play out was wrong. Literally, everything. Do you people really think MSNBC is some anti-war network? I’m literally sick to my stomach.

libfreeordie on June 17, 2014 at 2:36 PM

The images of carnage caused by ISIS, however seem not to impact this person.

The CIA says that the al-Assad clan in Syria has been making chemical weapons since before Saddam Hussein even took power in Iraq.

Not even the Bush Administration tried selling that day old fish…

JohnGalt23 on June 17, 2014 at 2:14 PM

I SAW them being moved to Syria for over a year before we went in. As part of my old employment I was able to review imagery showing the convoys moving the materials.

Why that never gets said is beyond me. I speculate that we fear widening the conflict there.

Bottom line: There were WMD’s. We know they had them. We know they did not destroy them. We saw them moved. Galt my ass! Just another Libertarian fool.

Capt Blasto on June 17, 2014 at 3:14 PM

Of course. Syria had their own chemical weapons industry going back to the seventies, and it was much more advanced than Iraq’s, second only to that of the major powers. When Syria took the WMDs from Iraq as a favor to Russia, they would have seen them as dangerous junk and simply buried them.

IF the democrats had left our troops in Iraq, this would not be happening. Remember, it took Germany and Japan 10 years b/4 they were “allowed” to do their own thing. And our MSM thinks a culture that has few beliefs in individual responsibility can go from totalitarianism to freedom in five years??? Give me a break.

The original blame is on the MSM. Subsequent blame, this democrat administration and its top-paid people.

If I were in Afghanistan, I’d be afraid, very afraid. Too many people of a certain “religion” have zero tolerance, to the extent of murder. Whoever teaches these thugs is also very guilty.

Wolfowitz added that abandoning Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a luxury the West cannot afford at the moment. “If we had walked away from [former South Korean Prime Minister] Syngman Rhee, who was the Maliki of his time, we would have had North Korea taking over South Korea,” Wolfowitz asserted.

Bull%$&#…

Korea was in the whitehot start of the Cold War. The Korean peninsula sticks out like a knife into Japan (look at a map) and even the Prussian/German advisors the Japanese had back in the 19th century pointed this out. This is a Japan we now occupied. This is a Japan that we now realized was to be a unsinkable aircraft carrier for us against the Soviet Union and a newly red China. Korea was now of strategic importance.

Also this was an easy to discern fight with Communists vs. Non-Communist Koreans, not the disorganized religious and ethnic mess that is Iraq. If we jump into Iraq to save Maliki we will have to side with the Shia and Iran, Period…End of Story! Is that now our ally? Rhee clearly was, not so with Maliki and Iran.

He added that the threat posed by ISIS creating a safe haven in Iraq represents a clear and present threat to the homeland. “This is about preventing another 9/11,” he said.

Good god…so is Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, the Palestinian controlled areas, Pakistan, Yemen, many more…is Paul wanting to invade those places too? This is not about ISIS, this is about Sunni Islamic Jihad. There are hundreds, if not thousands of groups out there who all want to do a 9-11 on us. They are located all over the place.

Now maybe someone should ask Wolfowitz where do these groups get their money, weapons, etc. from? It does not just come out of thin air! Oh…that is right…it comes from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, etc. All the places Wolfowitz and his “Bush Wing of the GOP” keep thinking are America’s allies. Are we really going to run around this earth putting down every Jihadist forest fire started by the House of Saud and their comrades? If we are going to fight Sunni Islamic Jihadists then that is where we should start, with Saudi Arabia, but no one wants to do that. Therefore, America should fold its cards in the Islamic world and focus on more important thing.

That’s as broad an ideological consensus on matters of national security and foreign affairs as it gets. How long can President Barack Obama resist that kind of pressure before acting?

It is broad ideological consensus of fat cat elite politicians, none of whom have clue one about Islam, its history, or what is really the cause for Sunni Jihadist groups like ISIS. They are imbeciles of the first order. As for Obama, as stupid as he is, he probably can read the polls…Most of America does not want to have anything to do with Iraq ever again. Hopefully this time I am rooting for Obama to do what he is best at…acting like a political hack and jerk and doing what is in his best political interests. That means no trying to save Iraq.

Why do people waste time claiming that Iraq had no WMDs? Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people, so he obviously had them.

But they always try to claim there were none. Not, “You know, maybe the Bush administration over-estimated how many there really were.” No, the claim is always, “He didn’t have any.”

Now, you can debate from here to the end of days how many WMDs Saddam had, and how big of a threat he really was. But when you claim he had none, you just reveal yourself to be ignorant or dishonest or both.

After watching Iraq fall apart 3 years after Obama was taking credit for how great it was, attacked by people that Obama assisted in the rebellion against Syria……

Yeah, the Bush administration were all foreign policy geniuses by comparison.

There Goes the Neighborhood on June 17, 2014 at 6:06 PM

I hate Obama…

But lets be clear about the Bush Administration.

(1) They handed Iraq to Iran. We have a constitutional republic, with lots of elections, and anyone who thinks we were going to stay in Iraq for a 100 years to sort things out needs to have their head examined.

(2) Bush ran around calling Pakistan and Saudi Arabia our allies, despite the fact they were the number one cause of 9-11.

(3) Bush called Islam the Religion of Peace, and never once made the connection between traditional Islam and Jihadism.

(4) Bush completely took his eye off Russia and even worse China. Both of which took advantage of us while we were playing around in Iraq. Now we will have to deal with the consequences of that. China is a far greater threat to U.S. national security than the entire Islamic world combined.

(5) If we were really interested in WMDs we should have taken out Pakistan. They have lots of nukes…not paper ones…real ones, and they hand the technology out like candy. Not to mention Pakistan was a major supporter of the Taliban, and that is were a certain Osama was hiding out. You ever wonder why we never told the Pakistanis we were going to do that hot on Osama?

All of the 911 terrorists came to America legally. Seems like we need to tighten the immigration laws and change the favored nation of origin. Clean up our own messy house and stop worrying about Iraq and Syria.

All of the 911 terrorists came to America legally. Seems like we need to tighten the immigration laws and change the favored nation of origin. Clean up our own messy house and stop worrying about Iraq and Syria.